The New Symposium
Portfolio Dialogues
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PERFORMER PORTFOLIOS IN DIALOGUE
Upcoming Performer Portfolio Dialogue: to be announced soon
The New Symposium begins with a premise: a performer’s portfolio is not merely a retrospective record of appearances and interpretations. It is an active form of practice—a site where conceptions of sound, embodiment, technique, collaboration, repertoire, and artistic agency can be reconstructed, questioned, and thought anew.
Each edition brings a distinguished performer in classical or contemporary music into sustained dialogue with a selected group of young and emerging performers. Past performances and projects still taking shape occupy the same field of attention, allowing retrospective reflection and present-tense experimentation to inform one another.
The discussion proceeds through recordings, scores, annotated parts, instruments, rehearsal materials, technologies, programs, collaborations, and conditions of production. These are treated not as supplementary documentation, but as primary materials of inquiry. They reveal how a score or concept becomes an event, how technique both enables and limits choice, and how interpretation emerges through the interaction of listening, embodiment, collaboration, technology, and place.
Viewed across time, a performer’s portfolio seldom supports a simple developmental narrative. An interpretive decision made in one context returns transformed in another; a technical solution becomes an aesthetic commitment; a collaboration redistributes artistic agency; an encounter with new repertoire, instruments, or technologies reorganizes the practice. Read relationally rather than chronologically, the portfolio becomes a structure of interpretations, adaptations, risks, and returns through which a performer continually redefines the terms of performance.
The inquiry triangulates three registers: the performer’s account, the rehearsal and decision-making processes through which a performance was developed, and its sonic, physical, and perceptual consequences. Convergence makes the relation between intention and realization legible; divergence reveals where performance exceeds authorial explanation.
The participation of young and emerging performers is constitutive of the format. Their practices, still in formation, introduce questions that may remain unavailable within an established method. In return, sustained engagement with a body of performances developed over time provides methodological perspective, historical depth, and resistance against which their own ideas can gain definition. Artistic knowledge in performance is embodied, situated, and relational; it is altered through demonstration, comparison, challenge, and revision.
Moderated by Urban Megušar, The New Symposium returns the performer’s portfolio to a state of potential. Recorded and remembered performances are reopened as propositions, while projects in formation become thinkable in public. The encounter asks not only what a performer has achieved, but what remains active within the practice—and what new modes of performance and listening it may yet make possible.
UPCOMING PORTFOLIO DIALOGUES
PAST PORTFOLIO DIALOGUES
COMPOSER PORTFOLIOS IN DIALOGUE
PERFORMER PORTFOLIOS IN DIALOGUE
APPLICATION FORM TO PARTICIPATE:
The New Symposium program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io